Construction will begin soon on the third Aurora class mid power booster. Officially designated as X5-03, the new rocket will be called “Big Red II”.

Big Red II will be named after the Artemis X2 booster “Big Red”, which was lost in a tree on July 3rd of last year.

Artemis Booster #1, “Big Red”.

When Big Red II goes into service, Aurora booster “Omnia” will be retired.

Omnia suffered from a design flaw in its ejection baffle system. During its maiden flights, the design flaw restricted airflow through the stuffer tube, which caused the flame of the ejection blast to stay in the tube too long. This permanently weakened the walls of the tube.

The “stuffer tube” is used to carry pressure from the engine’s ejection charge to the parachute bay . The ejection charge deploys the parachute. The charge is made of black powder (i.e. gun powder). The powder is used to pressurize the tube when ignited at the appropriate time in the rocket’s trajectory. This pressure is used to deploy the parachutes.

With each flight Omnia makes, the tube becomes weaker and weaker. I came up with a fix to redirect the gasses around the area, but it is not permanent. It is for this reason that Omnia Rocket will be retired after a few more missions.

The Artemis booster “Big Red” (Aurora X5-03’s namesake) had a similar situation caused during the early development of the ejection baffle system used on all of my rockets.

Big Red II will be painted using the same red metallic finish, and should be ready in time to fly close to the 1 year anniversary of the original Big Red’s maiden flight.

By early summer 2011, the final Aurora booster X5-04 should be ready for its first mission bearing the name “Voyager”. This will provide me with three good payload rockets to carry out all the experiments needed to develop technologies and techniques for a Level 1 build by sometime in November 2011.

More information to come!

New pictures from Firefly’s January 16th, 2011 mission AU-11

This is a frame capture from the on-board video camera showing the moment of parachute deployment.

Three flights were successfully flown on January 16th after being delayed a day for unfavorable weather conditions. Aurora X5 booster “Firefly” marked the first flight of the year for us on mission AU-10, it’s maiden flight. Lifting off on an Aerotech E-18, Firefly climbed to an estimated 1100 feet. It’s anti-zippering technology was put to the test during a ballistic re-entry, and successful parachute deployment. It’s second flight mission, AU-11, was launched on an Aerotech F-24. Max altitude was around 1400 feet, and again, a too-long ejection charge brought it in steep for a rough parachute deployment, for which the anti-zippering tech performed flawlessly.

Firefly lifting off on its maiden voyage...

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shzuyAM1a2Y

The link above is the video from the maiden launch.

Perseus booster “Eagle” flew one flight to test its modifications to retrofit it with similar anti-zippering tech. I decided to also go for the high performance / high altitude mission originally planned for Columbia at this time as well. Eagle pulled off both objectives flawlessly. Eagle reached close to the 2,000 foot altitude goal, coming in at 1800 feet. To make this altitude, I did not fly the on-board camera on Eagle to make her as light as possible. Mission PLS-30 was a total success.

Eagle lifting off for a high performance flight mission...

If all goes well (weather, schedules, etc.), our next launch should be on February 12th. The plan is to use Aurora X5 Firefly to perform a (dry) test run of our dual deployment electronics. More on that as we get closer.

Due to high wind forecasts (around 20 MPH and higher) we at MTMA decided to scrub the club launches, and try again for after 12:00PM Sunday the 16th.

My schedule of launches has been changed. The high performance mission for Columbia has been moved to sometime around April or May 2011 for the Amherst field. Eagle is scheduled to fly instead to test one of the retrofit designs for Anti-Zippering for the existing Perseus booster fleet.

Firefly is still scheduled to make its maiden voyage on the re-scheduled day. One change in its maiden mission will be a slightly modified on-board camera system. I managed to modify the existing camera pod with the aim of cutting the weight in half.

This change has been successful, so this should result in a much higher altitude for all rockets using the on-board video camera.

We are re-setting the countdown for Sunday, January 16th @ the O’Reily high power field…